Liebe 80

German sex education films flourished in the late 1960s. This was partly due to this country's deplorable state of sex education at the time, but mostly this was the only format in which the German censors at the FSK would tolerate nudity and sex at the cinema. When the censorship rules were relaxed a few years later, sex education was quickly driven out of the movie theatres by feature films with sexual content.

Here we have the rare example of a sex education film released in 1981, and you may wonder why anybody would bother. Director Krausser bothered, because he wanted to include more explicit nudity and sex than feature films were permitted to show - in other words, this is very much a similar story to the one of the British Lover's Guide a decade later. It is intriguing to observe how the envelope was pushed here: female labia and erect penises are shown in closeup, but only as stills, and when the sexual action moves beyond petting to oral and coital sex the picture is suddenly switched to negative, presenting the viewer with the apparently much less morally corrupting sight of a greenish penis being fellated by a greenish woman.

The title 'Liebe 80' (i.e. love 80) is somewhat misleading. Much of the fashion on display clearly belongs to the 1960s. Mostly Krausser scavenges from late 1960s and early 1970s sex education flicks (even the feature film "Sonne, Sylt und kesse Krabben" is used for a few scenes), perhaps now being able to include material that had to be cut a decade earlier, and consequently very little of the footage is original. The tone of the commentary maintains the trademark aloofness of the earlier pictures, explaining sex with the emotional detachment one would normally expect in a corporate training video for washing machine repairs.